Federalismo e Secessão (e a China versus "Taiwain")

No momento em que algumas vozes (os suspeitos do costume, embora o próprio Bush pareça ser mais cauteloso) se levantam para confrontar a China por causa da sua lei anti-secessão e que surge depois de em "Taiwain" exista quem ameaçe (e seja incentivado a ameçar...) a declarar unilateralmente a independência ( e ainda que a China tenha sempre mostrado aceitar pacificamente o actual Status Quo ), vamos recordar o primeiro precedente histórico anti-secessão (e uma referência necessária para a discussão sobre o Federalismo Europeu), pelas próprias palavras de Lincoln:

Lincoln's First Inaugural AddressMarch 4, 1861:

"(...)Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you.

I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

(...)

I now enter upon the same task for the brief Constitutional term of four years under great and peculiar difficulty. A disruption of the Federal Union, heretofore only menaced, is now formidably attempted.

I hold that, in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever--it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.

Again, if the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it--break it, so to speak; but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?"

Lincoln defende aqui que um acordo de União (suponho que Federal não?) entre Estados se transforma em perpétuo e que não pode ser quebrado por nenhuma das partes (promissor para a Europa...). E conseguiu defender a sua tese apesar da 10º emenda dizer explicitamente:

Amendment X - Powers of the States and People. Ratified 12/15/1791. Note: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

O que poderá ser facilmente interpretado como, não tendo sido delegada a capacidade de manter pela força a União, o direito de secessão é retido por cada um dos Estados.

Quanto a algumas afirmações de Lincoln sobre a questáo da escravatura:

"I am not in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office." (September 15, 1858, - campaign speech)

"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery." (March 4, 1861, - First Inaugural Address)

"I am a little uneasy about the abolishment of slavery in this District of Columbia." ( March 24, 1862, - letter to Horace Greeley)

"If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it." (August 22, 1862, - letter to Horace Greeley, New York Tribune editor)

From the Lincoln Douglas Debates of 1858, "I will say, then, that I am not, nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not nor ever been in favor of making voters of the free Negroes, or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office, or having them to marry with white people. I will say in addition, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which, I suppose, will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and political equality, and inasmuch as they cannot so live, that while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, that I as much as any other white man am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man."